


Hearth & Castle

by TheColorBlue



Series: Life in Present Tense [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Recovery, Stark Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-25 20:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1661204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stark Tower doesn't offer Bucky only a safe place to stay, but also a chance to figure out what he is when he isn't a weapon. </p><p>A follow-up to "I Seek Not Your Loyalty."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“He’s adorable. Like a feral kitten. However did you get him to follow you home?”

Steve did not even bother dignifying that with a response, and “Tony,” Natasha said, like droll warning. 

“I can’t take you seriously either. You look like you rolled out of a hipster’s closet.”

She glanced over at Tony with her blankly innocent Natasha look and said, “What can I say. I’m, how would you put it, _hip to the trends._ ”

“My God, _no_.” 

Meanwhile, Bucky was prowling the perimeters of the empty flat. He looked down at the view of Manhattan, and then said, “I don’t like it.” 

“I already told you,” Tony said, “Pepper has an interior designer already picked out for your personal consultation, it won’t even look the same furnished—”

“We’re too high up,” Bucky said, flatly. 

Then Bucky went round and, well, he didn’t cling to Steve’s side, but he was hanging around very closely in the vicinity of it, standing between him and Sam. He was like a vaguely skittish but quite potentially lethal shadow. He stood very straight with his hands hanging loosely, and said, “In the scenario of an attack, we’re too high up for an effective exit strategy. I doubt even Steve would survive a fall from up here.” 

Tony frowned at Bucky as he said, “This tower has stairs and a second emergency elevator with reinforced construction and it’s own back-up power source. I’ve got a suit that stays with the tower, again for emergencies, that JARVIS has protocols for using in the case of an attack. The suit should get you out safely. I’ll even give you the access code for that one, personally, since I can tell that would make you feel better. That’s assuming antagonistic forces even get up this far. We have state of the art security all through the tower. Not to mention, half the time we’ve got the Hulk living just downstairs. I mean, Dr. Banner is abroad a lot of the time, being a do-gooder or whatever he’s doing, but this tower is his home base in the United States, pretty much.”

“You sound like a very lonely individual trying to get people to come and stay at your house,” Natasha remarked.

Steve actually laughed at that, Sam was smiling too, and Tony said, with exaggerated hurt, “You wound me. That’s cold, darling, truly it is. I won’t even mention that there’s a floor for you too, if you want it.” 

“I prefer my living arrangements to have, shall we say, more anonymity.” 

“And the flat with a view of Central Park isn’t going anywhere, all the same.” 

Meanwhile, Steve was looking over at Sam inquiringly and Sam shrugged. “Hey, it’s up to you, man. This is where you and Bucky are potentially staying, not me.” 

“I think… this is a lot of space,” Steve said slowly. “Too much space. This front room and kitchen is bigger than my whole last apartment.” 

“When are you going to start living, Captain Frugality?” Tony wanted to know. “You save the world, and yet you chose to live in a broom closet. Not anymore, Steve. Here we have style and security and, hey, it’s not even going to cost you a penny. Think of it as appreciation for, I don’t know, battling evil and saving the world at least three times and being so wholesome the rest of us want to chuck you out of a window.”

“Tony, we don’t want to accept charity—”

“Speaking of which, I’d even suggest you spend the difference on charity. Be more of an intolerable do-gooder, I won’t hold it against you.” 

“We haven’t even decided if we want to stay yet,” Steve said, but more gently now. “I think we should take a few days.”

Tony pulled out his phone and started texting something into it, like he was ignoring Steve. “I’ll have Pepper’s interior designer come by in an hour. You and Bucky over there can consult with her and we’ll have the place furnished by the end of tomorrow. In the meantime, I want to give you kids the star treatment at my bar. That would be back upstairs, so chop chop.” 

Bucky lingered, looking round at the empty room and at the glass of the windows, and Steve put his hand to Bucky’s shoulder. Tony said, watching them, “Look. I’m not trying to be pushy. I’m sorry if that’s how I come off, it’s just the way I am. But I’m only offering a place like this because I know the feeling, like being a moving target. Or to know that your loved ones can be targets too. Me: I was stupid enough to announce that I was, in fact, Iron Man. You two: well, aside from Steve being Captain America, we all know that there’s always the possibility that Hydra could come after Bucky again. If it were me, I’d prefer to simply not make it easy for them.”

“Your floor looks like a castle,” Bucky remarked. 

Tony looked over at Bucky in way that was somewhere between inquisitive and accessing, and Bucky said, “Your floor: with the stone and the metal and the glass. It looks like a castle. Or a stronghold.” 

“I knew you were a smarty-pants,” Tony said. “The flooring itself’s not actually stone—just looks like it, but Pepper can go comfortable barefoot on the stuff—but yeah, it’s nice, isn’t it?”

“You boys coming?” Natasha asked from the elevator. “Sam’s dying of thirst over here.”

“I never said anything,” Sam said. 

“I’ll show you the R&D floors later,” Tony said to Bucky. “We’ll see if we can get you set up with a project, or whatever, or maybe your first project can be to design some kind of emergency flight kit since you’re so concerned, now wouldn’t that be swell.”

“ _Tony_ ,” and it was Steve, that time. 

“Shutting up now, shutting up,” Tony said, and stepped into the elevator.


	2. Chapter 2

On the first night, the only furnishings that Steve and Buck’s floor had were a bed and dresser each in two of the bedrooms. Sam stayed in one room, and Steve and Bucky shared the other. 

Bucky couldn’t sleep. 

He lay very still until he thought that Steve was sleeping, and then he slipped out of their shared bed. 

He went out into the huge front room, and crouched by the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city. 

Even after escaping them, it felt like Hydra was still taking away his choices, one by one. If it hadn’t been for… if it hadn’t been for _him_ , he and Steve might have still been in D.C. They would have been in Steve’s comfortable little apartment, where everything was just the right size, and Steve could go running in the mornings with Sam where they always ran. They would go to the familiar stores for food and clothes and other items like floss and laundry detergent. Sure, Bucky had compulsively, obsessively checked the security of the place while they’d been there, but here, looking down—Bucky was in a glass cage all over again. 

Bucky curled up and lay down, right there on that carpet. The carpet smelled unused, new. There were scents like paint and glass and stone. There were no lived-in smells in the vast space of that apartment. The metal of Bucky’s left hand and arm were unforgiving as they pressed into the flesh parts of him, where he was curled up. He turned onto his side. 

This was supposed to be a new beginning. 

Here, he was supposed to be safe, with Steve. They were supposed to be safe. 

There was never going to be safety. 

Only cages. 

His silent weeping had just turned to wracking, ugly sobs when he heard a soft, almost gentle “Sir, may I be of any assistance?” 

Bucky sat straight up, rigid, but he knew the sound of that voice. It was Stark’s AI, JARVIS. Bucky had heard Tony talking to JARVIS earlier that day, in the elevator, and he’d thought that Tony was the only person who spoke to JARVIS.

“I’m… fine,” Bucky finally got out. His voice felt thick and wet from the crying. “No…no assistance required.”

“Are you sure about that, Bucky?” 

Steve had been there in the room for some time. Bucky had hoped that if he’d ignored Steve, Steve would have gone back to bed. 

Steve knelt behind Bucky, and tentatively put a hand to Bucky’s shoulder. 

“I’m so unhappy Steve,” Bucky said simply. “I’m so unhappy.” 

Steve put his arms around Bucky and held him close. 

“I could get our pillows and the sheets. We can sleep out here, if you want.”

Bucky just nodded, without saying anything else. 

That’s how Sam found them, when the sun was just barely peaking up into the sky, come morning: curled around each other in bedding on the floor, Steve’s hand in Bucky’s hair as Bucky watched the sun rise.


	3. Chapter 3

It took two days to complete furnishing the flat, not one. Half of that was waiting for deliveries. There was a bedroom for Bucky and Steve, and a bedroom for Sam, and an extra furnished bedroom for either guests or Bucky or Steve if someone needed the space, and there were still five vacant rooms left over. While the workmen went in and out, the group took the few days off. Natasha too. Even Black Widows needed vacation time. They went out to eat. They went to Central Park. They went to museums. They sat around on Tony’s roof deck with take-out containers while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

It was nice. 

\- -

“Okay, here’s the surprise,” Tony said, putting a hand to Bucky’s shoulder and steering him towards what should have been one of the spare rooms. Bucky glanced back at Steve, while Steve just looked back and said, “I didn’t have anything to do with this.” 

“Darn tootin’ you didn’t,” Tony said. “Can’t be giving you credit for everything. Dr. Banner actually had some input on this, let’s see what you think—”

“Wow,” said Sam, when he saw it, and Natasha went to flop down on the comfy looking sofa. 

“It’s workspace for Sgt. Barnes,” Tony said. “Plenty of natural light,” there were floor to ceiling windows, “hardwood flooring, a work station with a holographic computer interface, soothing color schemes” the walls had been painted in soft shades of blue, and there was a landscape painting on the wall, “Pepper picked out that painting herself, she has good taste and I don’t, something like that. And, ah, house plants. To keep you company, maybe. I don’t know, if you don’t like them I guess we can get rid of them.”

“They’re fine,” Bucky said slowly, looking around. Then he looked over at Tony, a little wide-eyed. “I don’t understand.” 

“Well, I _figured_ that you wouldn’t really go in for something that screamed hard sciences,” Tony said. “Also got the idea from seeing my therapist’s office. First of all, yes, after too many panic attacks I, Tony Stark, did cave in and start seeing a therapist, and two, in my defense the lady has impeccable taste. _And_ , I’ve got a second, similar office set up downstairs, in case you ever decide you want to, I don’t know, start seeing new faces every once in a while. I’ve set you up next to Dr. Banner’s offices and lab. There’s also some of the interns cubed down there, I don’t know. Harmless, innocent-faced folks for the most part. Mostly harmless. Maybe.” 

“I never thought I’d see the day,” Sam said. “I mean, this is a class act, Tony; demonstrates a lot of finesse, for a guy who likes to go around in a gold and red metal suit.”

“Don’t be too surprised,” Natasha said, smirking gently from where she was sprawled out. “Tony Stark isn’t completely incapable of subtle gestures.”

“Thank you, Natasha my love.”

“This is really incredible, Tony,” Steve said, and “Thank you,” Bucky whispered, looking at Tony. He looked like he wanted to bolt for it, but he didn’t. 

“I’ve told JARVIS to help you out if you need anything. Technological moral support, whatever. Okay, okay, stop looking like you’re about to cry, there’s a special place in hell for people who make feral kittens cry. Anyone want to order out for pizza? I could definitely go for some pizza right now.” 

“Thank you,” Bucky said again, before Tony had shooed him out of the room. 

“Oh, don’t thank my just yet. I’m just thinking that it’d be my greatest achievement to turn the former Winter Soldier into a STEM fields geek. We’ll buy you a pair of hipster glasses, Hydra won’t even know where to look for you. Now come on, let me feed you and your buddies over here,” and Bucky let Tony shepherd him out with the rest.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning, Steve, Sam, and Natasha are called out to take care of Hydra operations. It’s 3 in the morning when Steve slips out of bed, when Bucky lets go of him. 

He can’t really sleep after that. 

He tries, but the unfamiliar bedroom is too quiet, too big, and he lies around for about two hours without sleeping, before climbing out of bed and sitting on the floor, leaning next to it, and then watching _Lilo and Stitch_ again on his tablet. The repetition is soothing. He watches the “He Melo No Lilo” musical sequence three times by itself, watching the fish and the waves, and then the Hawaiian dancers, before turning off his tablet, putting it on the bedside table, grabbing his phone, and then going out into the kitchen. 

Stark was right: the entire place looks different with furniture and decor in it. It’s cozy, just the right mix of a more traditional, early last century sensibility and the tastefully contemporary. 

The fridge is stocked with groceries, now. Bucky helps himself to a glass of orange juice. 

He drinks the whole glass.

Afterwards, he takes the elevator down to the gym and runs like, thirty miles, before coming back up, stretching and cooling down, showering, and then cooking and eating two large plates of scrambled eggs with toast. He eats it sitting on the floor and looking at the windows at the cityscape below. Tony had said that nobody outside could see back through the windows of the tower. Privacy was pretty important, you know. Bucky looks down at the tiny cars and the movement of pedestrians and eats his eggs and his toast. 

He washes dishes, and then goes to the brand new work room that Tony had put together for him. 

He stands in front of the work table, and then asks, tentatively, “JARVIS?” 

“At you service, as always, Sgt. Barnes,” came the soft-spoken, British voice from the walls.

“Just Bucky is fine.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“… Never mind.” Then, “JARVIS, what are you, exactly?” 

“I am the artificial intelligence program that Tony Stark created to assist in day-to-day work, including but not limited to security, data collection and analysis, software processes, communications—” 

“That’s fine, JARVIS,” Bucky interrupts. “Thank you. Do you have any other functions aside from glorified butler?” 

“I am here to assist you as well, Sir.” 

“No. I mean, are you really _alive_.” 

“My functions are not reliant on organic or cellular based processes. I am not _alive_ in regards to the common parlance of the term.”

“My arm is not based on organic or cellular-based processes either, but it has functions like a flesh arm. It articulates like flesh muscle, and the pressure and movement sensors are wired directly to my central nervous system. And yet it’s not _alive_.”

“That is correct, Sir.” 

“...JARVIS, please describe for me the privacy and security of any data files and projects I create in this workplace.” 

“Sir, you have been allocated your own private server. Your password, once you create it, can be either inputted manually or verbally. Mr. Stark will not have access to your files except in the case that you express permission. I will not be able to share you data with Mr. Stark unless you have given permission. There are, however, override protocols in the scenario that I detect you may be engaging in projects that target or may cause harm towards but not limited to Mr. Stark, Ms. Potts, Nick Fury—”

“Fine, fine. I understand.” Bucky internally debates the finer points of paranoia vs. looking a gift horse in the mouth, and then said. “JARVIS, would you be able to scan for me and create schematics of my arm? I’d want all layers, top to bottom, including three-dimensional models.” 

“Would Sir like a scan of the metal or biological arm?” 

Bucky opens his mouth—and then he closes it, narrowing his eyes. Something about that tone—“Both, I guess, and did you just make a joke?” 

“Sir has caught me,” was what JARVIS said, almost laughter somewhere in the sound of it. “If Sir would put both arms on the table work surface and refrain from movement. Process time for the biological arm: five minutes. Process time for the cybernetic prosthesis: ten minutes.” 

Bucky sits very still as he waits, not looking at the lights of the scanners, or at the models being built in the holographic display work space. 

“Would Sir like an audio-visual entertainment display while Sir is waiting?” 

“...No,” Bucky says. “No, thank you.” 

Something about talking to JARVIS makes him acutely aware of verbal courtesies. 

“JARVIS,” he finally says. “How do I know that I can trust you and Tony?” 

JARVIS is silent for a moment. Then he says. “I would take this opportunity to remark that Mr. Stark himself is inclined to paranoia, not unlike yourself. He has arranged to always be in full access of his armored suits. He has built this tower, as Sir remarked in an earlier exchange, ‘like a stronghold.’” 

“You did not answer my question,” Bucky says. 

“I believe that there is no correct answer to your question, Sir. It has been proven repeatedly, however, that Sir has been willing to risk his life to protect others. It is my assertion that Mr. Stark is, as some would put it, ‘a good man.’” 

“Good isn’t the same thing as infallible.” 

“No one is infallible, Sir.”

“… Everything used to be simpler for me,” Bucky says, tiredly. “I didn’t think about anything like this. I couldn’t afford to. It was just me, and then finding Steve, and then the only person I ever had to trust was him and somehow there was a part of me that knew that already.” 

He looks at the softly colored paint tones of the walls, and then the painting that had been hung up, and then the green of the house plants. 

“Scanning of biological arm complete,” JARVIS says, and then later, “Scanning of prosthesis complete, Sir.” 

Bucky dismisses the scans of his flesh arm, he’ll use it later to compare the functions of the two arms, but for now he centers the model of the metal prosthetic. 

“I don’t really know anything about how it works,” he admits out loud. “I wouldn’t even know how to repair it.” 

“Sir’s arm is, as some would say, ‘state of the art.’ Its design surpasses those developed by Stark prosthetics.” 

“Is that a fact.”

“Indeed, Sir.” 

“You’re secretly a sarcastic bastard, aren’t you?”

“One may take after their forefathers.”

“Goddamn Tony,” Bucky says, not meaning anything particular about it. Then, “Can I take this model apart?”

“In what manner would Sir like this done?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, idly. Then, and he didn’t know why he said it, “Dramatically.” 

“Sir need only make contact.”

Bucky reaches out with his right hand. 

When his finger touches the light, the holographic model shatters apart, the pieces falling onto the table. 

Bucky looks down at the broken image of it. 

As a sniper, Sgt. James Barnes had needed focus, concentration. 

As the Asset, the Winter Soldier had been nothing but focus, and concentration. 

Bucky shuts his eyes for a moment, feeling suddenly sick. There is an intrusive thought in his mind—the idea of throwing himself out that window, everything shattering. 

He covers his face with his hands, for a moment overcome. 

“Sir, please. Deep, slow breathes.”

Bucky tries to remember how to breath.

Slowly, in, then out. 

He puts down his hands, and looks back that table. 

Then he reaches out, and picks up the pieces again.


	5. Chapter 5

When Steve and Sam returned to Stark Tower, three days later, while Natasha had stayed behind to tie up some loose ends for Fury—well, when they got back, Bucky and Tony were waiting for them in the lobby. Tony might have been yelling at them about how Bucky, the sly bastard, had managed to finagle his way into a self-created position in Stark’s medical prosthetics division, something about doing exceptionally sophisticated analysis on his own arm while everyone’s back was turned, but Steve wasn’t even listening. 

“Your hair,” Steve managed to get out.

“I know,” Tony said. “He doesn’t look like a sad trash hobo prince anymore, does he?”

“Goddamnit Tony,” Sam said, but neither Steve nor Bucky seemed to even be paying attention. 

Bucky—sort of ducked his head a tiny bit, not quite looking at Steve.

“You look amazing,” Steve said. 

Bucky finally looked up at Steve. “I thought… I might be ready for the change.” 

His hair was short now, with a sort of contemporary styling. He didn’t look like the old Bucky, but he didn’t look completely unlike him, either. 

“Soo, cybernetic engineering, huh?” Sam asked.

Bucky shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe for now. I just thought—I didn’t want this arm to be Hydra’s, anymore. I wanted it to be mine. I’m—I’m still working on that.” Then, glancing a little more shyly, or maybe coyly at Steve, “I don’t get a kiss hello?” 

While Steve was giving Bucky the hello kiss of his life, Sam said to Tony, “Well I guess they’re probably staying here then.” 

“You should stay too, Wilson,” Tony said. Then, “I’m not even joking, put your affairs in order and move your ass here: do it do it do it—”

“TONY.”


End file.
